Name: This Is How You Smile
Brand: Helado Negro

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

RVNGNL054lp

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2019-03-08

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Secre­tly

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

747742382505

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

RVNGNL054cd

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747742382512

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Helado Negro

Genre US

Rock-Pop

Label US

RVNG INTL.

Albums of the Year 2019 Top 100

Roberto Carlos Lange (born 1980), better known by his stage name Helado Negro, is an American musician. In 2019 he was awarded a United States Artists Fellow in Music and also the recipient of a 2019 Grants to Artists award in Music from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2015 he received a Joyce Foundation award.

A South Florida native, born to Ecuadorian immigrants and based in Brooklyn, Roberto Carlos Lange’s upbringing provides essential elements to his songwriting, including his consistently bilingual—English and Spanish—lyrics. Exploring the expressivity within intense states of being, Latinx identity, and pluralistic sensibilities, his music as Helado Negro is an engrossing statement achieved through lyrically personal and political avant-pop music. Half a decade and half a dozen albums since Helado Negro’s 2009 debut album Awe Owe, and multiple projects under various aliases, Lange has cultivated an untraditional approach to songcraft that places his voice on an adventurous musical impulse without shying away from familiar pop appreciation.

Helado Negro is now signed to and released his 2019 album This Is How You Smile through RVNG Intl., a Brooklyn-based music institution. This Is How You Smile received an 8.5 rating and Best New Music from Pitchfork.

Back In Stock

Helado Negro returns with This Is How You Smile, an album that freely flickers between clarity and obscurity, past and present geographies, bright and unhurried seasons. Miami-born, New York-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange embraces a personal and universal exploration of aura – seen, felt, emitted – on his sixth album and second for RVNG Intl. Helado Negro’s 2016 album Private Energy, re-released as Private Energy (Expanded) in 2017, is an urgent affirmation of self-love and solidarity driven by Lange’s personal response to sanctioned violence towards people of color. The widely embraced album furthered the artist’s visibility beyond a community of fans long established through a rigorous recording and touring career, with moments like “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin” aligning with a larger social demand for basic rights amongst marginalized people and the universal imperative to love, be loved, and thrive. This Is How You Smile’s opener “Please Won’t Please,” a call back to Private Energy, finds vitality in turning the privacy dial further inward. Setting the scene with a spare drumbeat that moves the music forward in a more maligned than militant march, Lange’s voice tenderly permits himself weariness: “We light ourselves on fire, just to see if anyone believes.” Something must be reserved, “will anyone rescue what’s left of me.” Diving into glimmering spirals, the remainder of the album takes leave of the broader “we” and mines intimate pairings – siblings, parent / child relationships, partnership, and old friends. The story of This Is How You Smile includes a jaunty, head-nodding walk with his brother on hot pavement to the community pool of his childhood neighborhood in Florida. Such days end with a welcome fatigue and chlorine blurred reveries in “Seen My Aura.” The confidence and security of youth, moves away from family, across years and regions, to a bleak winter of “Imagining What to Do,” and loving partners deciding to make each other smile, while waiting for the sun to return. This Is How You Smile derives from Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” a story she wrote in the form of a mother’s sole, complicated, but loving voice, speaking a “How to” litany of advice ranging from domestic chores to what a daughter, an immigrant and young woman of color, must do to protect herself in a world that was not designed by or for her. This is how joy, or its visage, at turns comforts, constricts, or becomes armor. Contemplating a parental voice, or its absence, becomes a question of where one may choose to return or depart. The lyrics of “Running,” seem to retrace the cyclical path of pop’s familiar obsessions, addressing the unrequited, fickle, or feared lover, “I feel you in my mind, all the time… you got me running, running…” Instead, the repetition of fleeing breaks with a languid laugh of recognition, that the lives of those who came before are within one’s own, even when we diverge, “I see you in my hands… just like you.” The song may also be read beyond seeing the humanity of self and parent, to the ever more visible global failures of patriarchal structures, and those moments when one sees their traces in self and those dear. Lange describes the album as the soundtrack of a person approaching you, slowly, for 40 minutes. In “Fantasma Vaga,” one of the first songs he wrote that set his approach for the album, a ghost wanders in from the low end, building a fuller form with each shaking step. Whirring, stops and starts of an eco espectral, may be musician trying to imitate, synthesize, the sound of a haunting, or a ghost itself trying to render the human voice. Lange often visualizes meeting strange beings, the odd encounters that occur in the creative process, a sound form of manipulation, in which who, or what is changing whom, becomes unclear. This Is How You Smile invites listeners on a walk through the changing colors of early mornings and evenings, writing, recording, or hearing a friend, a figure emerges, and there you are. The album will be released across various formats on March 9, 2019, with Helado Negro ever present on stages around the world in support.

This Is How You Smile

Music US

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